Heteroerotic Failure and “Afro-queer Futurity” in Mohamed Camara’s Dakan

Abstract

ABSTRACT The year 1997 marked the release of Mohamed Camara’s film Dakan, which centers on two young men entangled in a homoerotic affair. Africa’s first LGBT film produced by an African filmmaker, Dakan featured explicit scenes of homoerotic love on the cinematic screen. While the film, upon its release, invited negative criticisms from Guinea where the plot of the film was set, it was paradoxically heralded in Europe and the United States as marking Africa’s triumphant entry into the liberal LGBT world. I pose the following questions: How does the film’s renunciation of heterosexual permanence valorize homoerotic possibility? How do the attempts by the young men’s parents’ to constrain them, through ritual practices, forced marriage, and the promise of wealth, create an archive of homosexual panic and enforce a postcolonial heteronationalist disorder? I argue that the film, unlike consequent documentaries on the situation of LGBT human rights in Africa, foregrounds a uniquely resilient queer African agency that nevertheless envisions a future of uncertainty.